


Choose your words, 'cause there's no antidote

by Summertime_saddness



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Clary is a mean drunk, Drunken Confessions, Drunkenness, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Jace and Clary think they are still siblings, Mild Language, Mild Sexual Content, Simon is offscreen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 17:24:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11212719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summertime_saddness/pseuds/Summertime_saddness
Summary: “Yeah, we had sex, Jace. That’s what I said, isn’t it?”Jace says nothing, but Clary isn’t surprised. She doesn’t know why she’s doing it, but the words keep tumbling out of her mouth like spilled milk, sour and rotting. She wants to be sick, to turn her words into vomit, to stop the feelings from rushing out her like an open wound. That’s what she feels like now - a festering infection, never healing.





	Choose your words, 'cause there's no antidote

She’s drunk. She realizes it only after she’s already half way down the sloping hallway of the institute, only after she’s clinging on the side of the walls, fingernails scraping against the wood.

It smells in here. It always does. That odd metallic tang mixed with the heady scent of wood and the deep smell of old books. Like the place can’t decide whether it’s a library or a butchery. Clary, in her state, thinks this is funny, she tries to smother her giggles against her hand, pressing her fingers into her mouth. She can still taste Simon on them.

Simon.

She wants to throw up, pushing the fingers farther into her mouth, until her purple painted fingernails are scraping along the top of her throat. She stops herself, coughing, spluttering, spitting out excess saliva onto the carpet. She’s too drunk for this. 

Clary sways against the wood of the hall, her boots pressing into the carpet, willing her head to stop spinning so badly. She wonders, vaguely, if there’s a rune to stop hangovers, sounds like something Izzy might know.

“Clary?”

Clary looks up, squinting slightly in the dark hallway, the low lamplight that lines the wall barely helping her see ahead.

Jace comes into focus slowly, until suddenly he’s right next to her, face turned to her’s in concern as he reaches a hand to steady her. 

“Are you OK?”

Clary opens her mouth to speak but thinks better of it, opting to shake her head, red hair swishing across her face like curtains in an open window. She hiccups slightly, swaying against Jace’s arms.

“Oh my - Clary, are you drunk?”

Jace sounds horrified and that more than anything makes Clary laugh. It’s loud and sudden in the quiet of the hall, and Jace stares at her, before clamping his own hand over her mouth. 

“Clary, Clary! Shut up.” Jace is smiling though, shock and amusement mingled together across his face. 

Clary pokes her tongue out against his palm, making him pull it back as if burned. She grins at him cheekily, sliding her tongue slowly back into her mouth, suggestively running it across her lips.

“Mm, Jace flavor.” 

Jace colors, pale face going red. He looks away from her, eyes focusing somewhere above Clary’s face. 

“Clary,” he says softly. “Don’t.”

She wants to run her hands along his face, smooth out his eyebrows with her purple painted fingertips so that the frown he always wears around her dissolves. 

In the back of her mind she knows she’s too drunk for this, too tired, too emotional. But Clary is drunk. Drunk and Jace is standing there, mouth slightly open, eyebrows furrowed. 

She leans in, quickly. It’s barely a kiss, more of a quick brush of her mouth against his, a press of contact. It makes her skin tingle. 

But Jace pulls back, quickly, so quickly. Clary’s slow brain barely can process it and her body loses all sense of bearing at the loss of contact. She falls to the floor like marionette with broken strings, her body slumping drunkenly on the carpet, her head knocking against the wall.

“Fuck!” Jace is wiping at his mouth, running his fingers through his hair. He looks wild. Eyes blazing.Clary laughs from her space on the floor, touching her own lips, feeling the still there tingle of Jace’s. She wants to kiss him again.

Jace, she registered, is wearing a nightshirt, open to expose his chest. There’s a sheen of sweat there, mixed together with the small splattering of blond hair. Clary wonders how it’d feel to run kiss him ther, to feel his salty sweat on her tongue. 

“Fuck, Clary, why’d you do that?”

Clary stares up at him from the floor. She likes the way the carpet feels, soft and almost wooly. She wonders if Jace will let her sleep here. She doubts it.

“I wanted too.” She says sleepily. Moving to put her head against the carpet on the floor. “Do I disgust you so much?” 

She grins up at him, poking her tongue out playfully. 

“No, Clary, stop.” Jace reaches down, grabs her by her arms and gently pulls her back into a standing position. 

They stand there quietly, Clary resting her head against the wall, body slumped into Jace’s. Jace stands there, watching her carefully, eyes wide.  
“You know how I feel, Clary.” Jace said quietly, voice nearly a whisper. 

Clary snorted, reaching a hand to wipe at her own mouth.

“What,” Clary snapped. “ That you want to fuck me?” 

She leaned forward, body tipping into his dangerously. 

“That you want to fuck your sister?”

Her voice is nasty, angry and clenched. Her teeth are bared like an animal, like a monster’s, and Clary feels nothing in her body except the bitter, burning rage, tearing like acid through her nerves. 

“Fuck, Clary!” Jace pulled away from her completely, turning to put space between them, running his fingers through his hair again. 

“You, you can’t just say things like that.” He’s facing away from her completely now, voice strained.   
“It’s not fair.”

Clary tried to shrug but only managed to lift her left elbow. She hiccuped softly.

“I’m sorry.” Clary managed. “I’m just drunk, can you just help me back to my room and we can forget about this?” 

Her face, she knew, was pale and sweaty. She could feel the makeup that usually rimmed her eyes drying steadily on her space above her cheeks. She suddenly wished she had never left Simon’s. 

Jace turned around slowly, averting his gaze. He gently pulled her along by her arm down the hallway towards her room.

It’s quiet for a while, just the slow drag of Clary’s uncoordinated feet against the carpet, and the sound of their own breathing. Then -

“Weren’t you supposed to be out with Simon, tonight?”

Clary doesn’t bother lying, even though a part of her wants too.

“Yeah, we had sex.”

Jace pulls up abruptly, and Clary barely has a moment to register before he’s moving again, a little faster this time. She can see her bedroom down now, the slightly uneven crack that ran on the bottom, the red hair tie around the knob that marked as her own. 

“You had sex.”

Jace repeats, voice flat.

Clary doesn’t have to look to know his eyebrows are pulled together tightly. Her fingers itch with the urge to touch.

Clary shrugged her way into her bedroom door, pulling them both inside, before Jace can pull away, pushing the door shut behind them. The click of the lock sounds loud in the empty silence. 

“Yeah, we had sex, Jace. That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Clary laughs mirthlessly, turning to pull her jacket over of her head and onto the floor.

Jace says nothing, but Clary isn’t surprised. She doesn’t know why she’s doing it, but the words keep tumbling out of her mouth like spilled milk, sour and rotting. She wants to be sick, to turn her words into vomit, to stop the feelings from rushing out her like an open wound. That’s what she feels like now - a festering infection, never healing.

She sits on the bed, letting her body sink to the soft material, to forget for a minute that Jace is even there, that any of this had even happened. She wonders what it would be like, to sink so deeply into a sleep, that reality stopped being real, when the dream took over completely. 

“Was it...ok?” 

Why was Jace talking now? Was he trying to be supportive, brotherly? To be a good friend? She doesn’t realize she’s saying this out loud until Jace is in her face, words tight, angry. 

“Stop it, Clary, just stop it!” 

They're both breathing hard, air mingling together, sour and unrestrained. She grabs his face, kissing him again, but harder this time. Nothing like the quick brush of the lips from before, this kiss is serious. It’s a fucking kind of kiss, Clary knows what that means now. She pulls her body flush to his, let’s her breasts press up against his chest, she can feel him gasping. He’s hard underneath her, trying to pull back but his head stays forward, trapped in a cocoon of Clary’s slim fingers, lips pressed together.

She wonders if he can smell Simon on her. His cologne, the stale scent of his bedroom, his cum between her thighs. She wonders if Jace hates himself the same way she hates herself, the hatred like black ink in her blood vessels, choking her brain, her heart. 

She pulls back to inhale, oxygen filling her lungs like a welcome, like a song. She lets Jace pull back completely from her, lets him sit on the floor, mouth and eyes open, staring at her face. She sinks slowly to the floor, pressing her body against the bed behind her.

“Clary…”

“It was my first time you know.” She says. Voice barely whisper. “I mean, I used to think it would always end up being Simon, but that was before, you know, before you.”

Jace says nothing and Clary stares down at her fingers, she wonders if maybe he left the room.

“It was fine, just fine, you know. Nice, I think. A good first time.” 

The silence is palpable. 

“He loves me.” She whispered pathetically to her hands, still resting against her knees. 

“It felt good, nice. It was nice.” She says again, softly. 

She doesn’t feel drunk anymore, only a deep tiredness that settled into her bones, weighing her body down. She feels like a her body is not her own, a sacrifice bled out like an animal on an altar, no one to still the butcher's hand before the blade came for her neck. 

She closes her eyes then, resting her tired head against the bed above her, exhaling out the words she felt simmering inside of her. She’s asleep before she realizes, waking only when Jace places her fully on the bed, lets her out from the cradle of his warm arms.

She’s been cruel to him, she knows it, the acid words still leaving trails of stinging pain on both of them. But Clary knows she has it in her now, this meanness, this horrid selfishness. So she only feels slight pull of guilt, an itch against her heart, when she whispers:

“Stay?” 

Jace’s face is unreadable in the dark, unknowable, studying her in silence. But then he pulls back only to slip the nightshirt of his body, to reach down to tug the shoes off his feet. Clary shoves at her own pants until they fall from her slim frame, and sleepily drags her shirt over her head and onto the floor.

They aren’t naked but it’s enough to make Clary’s hazy mind feel exposed, so she turns over, burrowing her body into the covers but leaving enough room for Jace to slowly slip in beside her.

They lay there, side by side, the darkness covering both of them like a physical weight, their quiet breathes the only sound they could hear. 

“I’m sorry.” Clary states.

Jace sighs, their bodies don’t touch, but the heady scent of him pulls at Clary’s mind like a sense memory, and she wishes she could back before, before any of this, before she knew the blood her their veins ran together.

“Me too, Clary.” Jace murmurs. “Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry Simon! 
> 
> Title from Ever Since New York by Harry Styles


End file.
